5 ms·

Your glasses analogy is interesting but I think is misleading, in that it assumes there's a correct way to view things. This approach is one of the major proble

by Jun8 14y ago

Your glasses analogy is interesting but I think is misleading, in that it assumes there's a correct way to view things. This approach is one of the major problems I have with Chomsky and other writers like him, i.e. "you have been duped by the (mostly US) media, the military-industrial complex, by the secret powers that may be; here is the real truth about matters". Rather than being presented as the truth, these opinions be seen to be another viewpoint that enhances your understanding of the situation. Let me give an analogy that may not be totally appropriate but I find is kind of illuminating: Many people, based on their everyday experience, believe in the existence of the centrifugal force (otherwise how to explain what they are experiencing daily). Then, their physics professor explains to them that in reality there is no such thing. Only if they study physics farther than the freshman year do they learn that that is not true either. Other similar examples of hypercorrection can be given (see this interesting answer: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/13568/852 http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/13568/852). The intent of the professor is benign, i.e. not to confuse the students, but it perpetuates a half-truth. Coming from a non-US country, I have to say that those of you who heavily criticize US media for manipulating opinion should look deeper into the media of other countries (not that I'm saying that the US media is non-manipulative, it's that the breadth of publicly sharable opinion is astonishing).

niels_olson 14y ago
> the secret powers that may be I think this is a concept inserted by a lot of Chomsky nay-sayers. I don't recall that being part of the worldview. My limited reading and viewing has left me with the impression, perhaps more disturbing, that there is no secret power. This really is just how people behave, and to really understand what's happening in real time, so that better interventions can be made, is going to take whole new fields of study. I think the solutions of anarchism or communism that some Chomskyites put forward are mainly bold attempts to add those vectors into the other much larger vectors that are already present in the public debate and tend to make the space appear very inhospitable to alternative view points. Much like Aaron described, the world seems very lonely afterwards, and hearing a shout in the distance is very welcome to the man alone in the desert.
- Jun8 14y ago
  Although I cannot site specific examples from Chomsky right now (wish I had books other than programmin ones at work, but it may freak out my colleagues) I find that belief in a "secret coalition" is as common in the left as it is in the right. This is understandable, because people don't want to believe the alternate (and, I think, much more correct) idea that you have mentioned, i.e. "This really is just how people behave." It's much easier to believe that some powers are manipulating people. For the record, I'm not a Chomsky nay-sayer, any intelligent person's (and he's brilliant, of course) opinion needs to be taken into account to update our worldview. It's just that the extremity of some of his positions (in linguistics, too) has made me lower the weight I use while I incorporate his views in the periodic update of my worldview on things.
  - lukifer 14y ago
    There is an inclination for those suspicious of mass media to believe in a shadow government, etc, pulling the strings of social control. The reality is more disturbing: for the most part, so-called elites conduct their business completely openly, shouting their intentions from the mountaintops, albeit sometimes masked in code, or through narrative framing.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    To some extent I would find a shadowy conspiracy more comforting than what I perceive to be the truth: That plenty of intelligent people do considerable damage to the world without it being their intention. At least a shadowy conspiracy sounds like it would be relatively easy to fix.
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    I suggest reading _Understanding Power_ (the book Aaron Swartz recommended). He's against conspiracy theories, and instead uses institutional analysis. Sorry for the wall of text: "It’s precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory, actually—in fact, in general this analysis tends to downplay the role of individuals: they’re just replaceable pieces. "Look, part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares—if they don’t do that, they will no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this: it’s not a conspiracy theory to point that out, it’s just taken for granted as an institutional fact. If someone were to say, “Oh no, that’s a conspiracy theory,” people would laugh. Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people to call it “conspiracy theory” is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view—“conspiracy theory” has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it’s something people say when they don’t want you to think about what’s really going on." [...] "Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory” — everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.” "It’s the same with business: business is again just operating out of a generalized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power—well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of domestic power, it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it."
kamjam 14y ago
Your glasses analogy is interesting but I think is misleading, in that it assumes there's a correct way to view things. I took it to mean you will see things more clearly, yourself. I may be wrong though.
klochner 14y ago
Chomsky is extremely methodical in citing references and providing evidence to back up his narratives. Any over correction is on the part of the reader, not the writer.
- Confusion 14y ago
  You can always support any position with ample evidence. The problem is balance. Chomsky doesn't cite the evidence that does not support him, even though there is always plenty of such evidence. This is considered normal, but it means you always only get part of the story, need to get the other parts elsewhere and then make up your mind. It's daunting.
neilk 14y ago
If you judge Chomsky by his fans, it is easy to dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist. That's not what he's doing. He's presenting another view of the world where, even in a free and democratic society, the media has institutional, structural weaknesses that cause it to serve power. To amplify certain messages, and attenuate others. It's an attempt to explain how a free society could have committed such atrocities as the Vietnam War, and later, gotten suckered into the Iraq War. I have seen the debate about this shift in my lifetime. In the early 90s, when the Manufacturing Consent movie came out, I was in a journalism program and even interviewed the makers of that film. Many of the other students in my classes found the film bewildering. They quite honestly believed the media were just serving the people in the great engine of democracy. Nowadays everyone is aware of how badly the media is failing the public. There are satirists who make this point on a literally Daily basis. Of course, the general public's cynicism is often unsophisticated, and manifests itself as accusations of intentional bias. But there is more and more awareness of how the structure of the media itself affects what gets covered - perhaps because the Internet offers a counterexample.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > Nowadays everyone is aware of how badly the media is failing the public. I so hope that you are right about that one.
  - rooshdi 14y ago
    Here's a recent survey that shows the media's credibility has dropped in the double digits over the past decade: http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-credibility-ratings-for-most-news-organizations/ http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-cr...
- twoodfin 14y ago
  Per Chomsky, suckered into both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. It would help Chomsky's case a lot if he identified a post-WW2 "good war". Does he think intervening in Korea was a good idea?
  - 14y ago
klochner 14y ago
Digressing . . . centrifugal force is a non-inertial force. It's roughly equivalent to being in a car which accelerates quickly so that you feel pressure from the seat on your back. The centrifugal force in this case would be the pseudo force that's propelling you backward with respect to the car. The seat's force pushing you forward is analogous to centripetal force. So I would argue it's a full truth with a pedantic asterisk - you can make any force appear by moving the reference frame. The same "force" would be present if you were standing stationary on the sidewalk and the car were accelerating toward you.
- cousin_it 14y ago
  Thanks! I've long understood that the centrifugal "force" appears due to an accelerating reference frame, but the comparison to an accelerating car makes it much clearer.

by Jun8 14y ago

niels_olson 14y ago

> the secret powers that may be I think this is a concept inserted by a lot of Chomsky nay-sayers. I don't recall that being part of the worldview. My limited reading and viewing has left me with the impression, perhaps more disturbing, that there is no secret power. This really is just how people behave, and to really understand what's happening in real time, so that better interventions can be made, is going to take whole new fields of study. I think the solutions of anarchism or communism that some Chomskyites put forward are mainly bold attempts to add those vectors into the other much larger vectors that are already present in the public debate and tend to make the space appear very inhospitable to alternative view points. Much like Aaron described, the world seems very lonely afterwards, and hearing a shout in the distance is very welcome to the man alone in the desert.

Jun8 14y ago
Although I cannot site specific examples from Chomsky right now (wish I had books other than programmin ones at work, but it may freak out my colleagues) I find that belief in a "secret coalition" is as common in the left as it is in the right. This is understandable, because people don't want to believe the alternate (and, I think, much more correct) idea that you have mentioned, i.e. "This really is just how people behave." It's much easier to believe that some powers are manipulating people. For the record, I'm not a Chomsky nay-sayer, any intelligent person's (and he's brilliant, of course) opinion needs to be taken into account to update our worldview. It's just that the extremity of some of his positions (in linguistics, too) has made me lower the weight I use while I incorporate his views in the periodic update of my worldview on things.
- lukifer 14y ago
  There is an inclination for those suspicious of mass media to believe in a shadow government, etc, pulling the strings of social control. The reality is more disturbing: for the most part, so-called elites conduct their business completely openly, shouting their intentions from the mountaintops, albeit sometimes masked in code, or through narrative framing.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  To some extent I would find a shadowy conspiracy more comforting than what I perceive to be the truth: That plenty of intelligent people do considerable damage to the world without it being their intention. At least a shadowy conspiracy sounds like it would be relatively easy to fix.
- calibraxis 14y ago
  I suggest reading _Understanding Power_ (the book Aaron Swartz recommended). He's against conspiracy theories, and instead uses institutional analysis. Sorry for the wall of text: "It’s precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory, actually—in fact, in general this analysis tends to downplay the role of individuals: they’re just replaceable pieces. "Look, part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares—if they don’t do that, they will no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this: it’s not a conspiracy theory to point that out, it’s just taken for granted as an institutional fact. If someone were to say, “Oh no, that’s a conspiracy theory,” people would laugh. Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people to call it “conspiracy theory” is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view—“conspiracy theory” has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it’s something people say when they don’t want you to think about what’s really going on." [...] "Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory” — everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.” "It’s the same with business: business is again just operating out of a generalized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power—well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of domestic power, it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it."

kamjam 14y ago

Your glasses analogy is interesting but I think is misleading, in that it assumes there's a correct way to view things. I took it to mean you will see things more clearly, yourself. I may be wrong though.

klochner 14y ago

Chomsky is extremely methodical in citing references and providing evidence to back up his narratives. Any over correction is on the part of the reader, not the writer.

Confusion 14y ago
You can always support any position with ample evidence. The problem is balance. Chomsky doesn't cite the evidence that does not support him, even though there is always plenty of such evidence. This is considered normal, but it means you always only get part of the story, need to get the other parts elsewhere and then make up your mind. It's daunting.

neilk 14y ago

If you judge Chomsky by his fans, it is easy to dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist. That's not what he's doing. He's presenting another view of the world where, even in a free and democratic society, the media has institutional, structural weaknesses that cause it to serve power. To amplify certain messages, and attenuate others. It's an attempt to explain how a free society could have committed such atrocities as the Vietnam War, and later, gotten suckered into the Iraq War. I have seen the debate about this shift in my lifetime. In the early 90s, when the Manufacturing Consent movie came out, I was in a journalism program and even interviewed the makers of that film. Many of the other students in my classes found the film bewildering. They quite honestly believed the media were just serving the people in the great engine of democracy. Nowadays everyone is aware of how badly the media is failing the public. There are satirists who make this point on a literally Daily basis. Of course, the general public's cynicism is often unsophisticated, and manifests itself as accusations of intentional bias. But there is more and more awareness of how the structure of the media itself affects what gets covered - perhaps because the Internet offers a counterexample.

jacquesm 14y ago
> Nowadays everyone is aware of how badly the media is failing the public. I so hope that you are right about that one.
- rooshdi 14y ago
  Here's a recent survey that shows the media's credibility has dropped in the double digits over the past decade: http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-credibility-ratings-for-most-news-organizations/ http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-cr...
twoodfin 14y ago
Per Chomsky, suckered into both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. It would help Chomsky's case a lot if he identified a post-WW2 "good war". Does he think intervening in Korea was a good idea?
- 14y ago

klochner 14y ago

Digressing . . . centrifugal force is a non-inertial force. It's roughly equivalent to being in a car which accelerates quickly so that you feel pressure from the seat on your back. The centrifugal force in this case would be the pseudo force that's propelling you backward with respect to the car. The seat's force pushing you forward is analogous to centripetal force. So I would argue it's a full truth with a pedantic asterisk - you can make any force appear by moving the reference frame. The same "force" would be present if you were standing stationary on the sidewalk and the car were accelerating toward you.

cousin_it 14y ago
Thanks! I've long understood that the centrifugal "force" appears due to an accelerating reference frame, but the comparison to an accelerating car makes it much clearer.